Why Americans just won’t take time off

One editor at a weekly magazine admits that he skimps on vacation. In more than two decades, he says he has only used all of his annual vacation days twice–the years his child was born and when he was promoting his book.

He is far from the exception. Paid leave, whether in the traditional structure of vacation and sick days or as the more general bank of hours paid time off policy, makes up nearly 7% of total compensation in private industry, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But employees rarely use all the time allotted. Workers, on average, fail to use nearly five vacation days a year, the U.S. Travel Association found.

As a result of all these unused days off, one study puts the liability taken on by U.S. businesses at $224 billion, due to workers’ rolling over unused paid time off. And that doesn’t take into account the fact that when people don’t take time off to reset, their resulting stress and burnout can be detrimental to both workers and their employers.

“I didn’t realize how extreme it was until I saw the research,” said Cheryl Rosner, CEO of Stayful.com, a hotel bidding and booking site. “It’s an epidemic of overwork. Forty-one percent of Americans don’t take their paid time off. On those days, you’re paying your employer to be at work.”

What could possibly explain not taking advantage of paid time off?

One oft-cited reason is facing too much of a mess upon return to work.

A reporter who divides his time between three publications in the Baton Rouge area said he leaves vacation days on the table quite often. “In the newspaper business, it’s risky,” he said. “You just don’t know how far behind it puts you.”

The editor from the aforementioned weekly magazine added, “I always felt (whether it was true or not) a mild pressure not to skip more than one issue. So you’d have to go away three or four times a year to use it all, which is not so easy. Also, because I have been here forever, I’m up to five weeks’ vacation. We have a pitch meeting every week, probably 50 times a year, and I can’t really see missing 10% of them. It would be a little too visible an absence.”

The amount of unclaimed days may also rise depending on an employee’s seniority.

When Latham Pali, the President at JP Nissen Co. was considering moving the company to paid time off versus the standard sick day/vacation day split, he surveyed employees and noticed a trend: “The higher up the person was in the company, the more time they left on the board. The lower down, the more they took. Now, often, people higher up have more to start with, and I did not look at if from a percentage standpoint, just the trend. What I also saw was that when a company switched from a sick day/vacation day pool to an all paid time off, they generally took more days off over the course of the year.”

But that blurring of lines between vacation and sick days can have drawbacks when there’s a limited number allotted. An administrative worker at a New York City law firm said, “If you’re sick and use all your days on that, you’re pretty much screwed. We also have to use it to do things like doctor appointments. If you have an appointment for an hour or so during the day, you have to use PTO to cover it.”

She also pointed out that workers may be more likely to come in when sick rather than use up their potential vacation days or take unpaid time off. “We had someone die in the office–die IN THE OFFICE–last year. She was pushing herself to come to work because she had no more days and could not afford to take unpaid time off.”

Inflexible scenarios like that can reflect deeper issues in the corporate culture, not just a lack of a progressive paid leave policy.

“If no one’s taking time off, that’s company culture,” Rosner said.

Like a few other tech startups, Stayful has unlimited paid leave. There is no asking for vacation days. Instead, employees use a team calendar. “It’s a culture of accountability…they’re self-monitoring, like adults do,” said Rosner.

Of course, people won’t take advantage of the policy unless the culture really supports it. If the startup has a 24-7, workaholic culture, workers still may not feel comfortable taking vacations, regardless of what the policy says. “It’s super important to model the behavior you want to see, and we want people to get out and take their time off,” Rosner said.

She has worked at startups long enough (including roles at Expedia and Hotels.com) that she doesn’t remember a time when she was counting an employee’s vacation days. But she has been in a position where she had to push someone who was burning out to take time off.

In fact, the company provides employees with $200 in hotel credits per year–use it or lose it– as incentive for taking time off. And even when employees can’t afford to travel, she says they should still take some days for a stay-cation–spend time with family and friends, take a hike, walk around the city, go to a spa. That paid time off is necessary to be happy, healthy, and productive.

“We need to help people shift their perspective,” said Rosner. “It’s not a perk.”

The paid sick leave battle continues, state by state

When residents of Massachusetts; Oakland, Calif.; and Trenton and Montclair, N.J. were asked if they wanted their local governments to require employers to offer workers paid sick leave on ballots in November, they voted yes in every instance.

President Barack Obama presented his proposal for universal paid sick days building on that momentum: “Let’s put it to a vote right here in Washington,” he said. “It’s the right thing to do.”

But as the wave of legislative and ballot initiative wins continues, there’s a counter trend spreading across the country that aims to kick the legs out from under future victories: statewide laws preempting local governments from instituting their own paid sick day mandates.

Rowden did not return requests for comment, but he when announcing the bill, he said it would ensure that businesses don’t have to deal with confusing and complex regulations that vary across the state and will protect businesses from activists on local city councils who want to attack job creators and hurt the middle class. On Twitter, he said that the legislation was intended to “protect small businesses from overreaching and unbalanced regulation.”

Eliminating the hodgepodge of local laws is a common refrain for advocates of statewide preemption laws, says Gordon Lafer, an associate professor at the University of Oregon’s Labor Education and Research Center. That was the rationale for a law that Florida Governor Rick Scott signed in June 2013. The bill, which had the support of Walt Disney World, Darden Restaurants, and the Florida Chamber of Commerce, “fosters statewide uniformity, consistency, and predictability in Florida’s employer-employee relationships,” Scott said in a statement at the time.

“What gets said is, ‘We shouldn’t have this mish-mosh of different laws; we want a state standard, and the state standard should be nothing,’” Lafer says.

Arguably, the most notable preemption law was passed in Wisconsin in 2011, when legislators approved legislation that repealed Milwaukee’s sick leave law—even though it had passed by ballot initiative in 2008 with 69% support—and prohibited local ordinances from requiring businesses to provide paid sick leave to employees. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker said the law would guarantee regulatory consistency. “Patchwork government mandates stifle job creation and economic opportunity,” he said. “This law gives employers the flexibility they need to put people back to work and that makes Wisconsin a more attractive place to do business.”

Lafer says that a lack of public awareness might have helped states push sick leave preemption bills through the legislative process—workers may know less about paid sick day benefits than they do about something like the minimum wage.

President Obama’s spotlight on paid sick leave in his State of the Union address may have pulled the issue out of the shadows. At the same time, Americans were not blind to the issue beforehand. The Public Religion Research Institute found that 81% of its respondents to a survey last year were in favor of the type of sick leave legislation that Obama is proposing, including 70% of Republicans.

The debate over sick leave this year may turn into a race to see if advocates can build enough awareness and support such laws before legislatures that oppose the benefit act to ban them.

That number could shrink slightly on Tuesday when voters head to the polls. The upcoming midterm elections are expected to shift control of the Senate from Democrats to Republicans, but in these four locations across the country, as voters choose candidates, they’ll also consider ballot initiatives to guarantee workers paid sick days:

Voters in Massachusetts could make the state the third in the country to guarantee paid sick days by passing a law that will allow an employee to earn one hour of sick time for every 30 hours worked. So far, only Connecticut and California have done the same.

Residents of Trenton and Monclair, New Jersey could join a growing number towns in the state that promise workers paid sick leave by voting on ordinances that would allow private sector workers to earn one hour of paid sick time for every 30 hours worked. A bill that would give paid sick days to New Jersey private sector employees state-wide made its way through the state assembly’s labor committee last week—a big hurdle on its way to becoming law. Newark and Jersey City have already enacted a paid sick leave law and similar policies have garnered approval in Paterson, Passaic, Irvington, and East Orange.

Oakland, California voters will have the opportunity to require employers to give workers at least five paid sick days per year. The state of California passed a state-wide paid sick day law in September, but it only guarantees three paid days off.

“This year has seen a tremendous number of wins legislatively that have more than doubled the number of locations with paid sick leave and tripled the number of people who will be able to [access] paid sick days,” says Ellen Bravo, executive director of Family Values@Work.

The absence of federal legislation ensuring paid sick leave is a vestige of a time when only one parent worked while the other provided primary care to children and older adults, according to a report by the Economic Policy Institute. Senator Edward Kennedy first called on Congress to address the issue when he introduced the Healthy Families Act in 2004, but it went nowhere. Senator Tom Harkin and Representative Rosa DeLauro reintroduced the measure in 2013. Those bills are in committee. Not having paid sick days forces parents to make a tough choice between taking care of a sick child or getting paid. According to 2010 report by the National Opinion Research Center, moms and dads without paid sick leave are twice as likely to send a sick child to school and are fives times as likely to take a child or relative to the emergency room because they can’t take time off during the day for a doctor’s visit.

Which workers have sick days and which ones don’t is a distinction made mainly along income lines. Nearly nine out of 10 private sector employees who earn the top 10% of wages have access to paid sick days, compared to 20% of people who earn wages in the lowest 10%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The absence of paid sick days is especially prevalent in the service industry, where 60% of workers don’t have the benefit.

Despite fierce resistance from the business community, the paid sick day movement is expected to grow, even after November 4. In six states—New Jersey, Maryland, Minnesota, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington—there are active campaigns pushing for legislation that would establish the benefit state-wide, Bravo says. What’s responsible for such progress? “The sky didn’t fall,” she says. “We have a growing body of research from places that have already done it that proves [that paid sick days are] helpful for workers and families and not a burden to business.”